“My poor brother. It was horrible. So long ago, Iris was only a baby, and my son wasn’t born, but he dreams it, Julian’s always told me he dreams of falling in flames —”
She had turned to face Bea. Her voice had altered (was it because of that plane on fire, was it because of her son?); it coarsened to a rough noise, ragged as the work of a saw. “I’m satisfied, yes! The way Marvin sees it, his wife’s run away, his son’s run away, the only one who hasn’t run away is his daughter. Why else do you think I came here? How else do you think I
got
here? And where else on earth could I go?” Her eyes were stretched wide, the lower lids lined with their narrow crescents of blood. “I — cannot — live — with my husband!”
The mild madwoman mildly incarcerated was all at once taking on a kind of sanity: it swept over Bea that it was the sanity of illumination. Clarity had stripped Margaret of the anodyne of manners. Her wild mouth, and the wilderness spitting out of it, impelled a tilt of her forehead and chin: she was becoming three-dimensionally alive.
Bea said slowly, “Do you mean you
wanted
to come? You chose to?”
“I got Marvin to agree to it. He thinks he got
me
to agree to it.” She ground out a sour laugh. “Can you understand what he’s made of me? Oh, but by now I can outthink him, I can think rings around him. I don’t blame you if you can’t see it. Why should you see it? Only I would imagine his sister . . . you lived with him once, you grew up with him, you had the same mother and father. I’ve always tried to imagine all of you, especially that mother of his, and if you’re anything like my husband, I ought to hate you. That’s what
he’s
good at, hating. You know what he’s hated since he was a boy, what he’s hated more than anything in the world?”
“No,” Bea said; though she thought she knew.
“That hardware store. That putrid hardware store. I never saw the place, I never
smelled
the place, he’s told me how it smelled, paint, kerosene, insect spray, who knows, but I owe my whole life to it. My whole life, because he was ashamed. He said he was poisoned by it. A poison needs an antidote, doesn’t it?”
She jumped up and bent her long body over Bea; her fingers forced pits into the velvet arms of the chair. The big gray short-lashed eyes came too near.
“You changed your name, didn’t you?”
“When I was married I did for a while. But I went back afterward.”
“You changed the name you were born with,” Margaret insisted.
“I’m a teacher, no one could pronounce it —”
“It’s German? Or I suppose it’s that Yiddish. You don’t think
I
could pronounce it? Or any of my own people? You’d have to gargle phlegm to get it right. Marvin changed everything else, just not his name. To torture himself, or maybe to impress my family with his so-called pride. He worshiped them, you know. Not that they took any notice of it —”
“It would be hard not to notice what a success he’s made,” Bea said. Was she defending Marvin, could it be? Or was it a hurt to her good-natured, modest father that she meant to rebuff, the memory of her father in the back room under an old-fashioned lamp, sunk in some novel, while her mother tended to business up front?
“Plastic airplane parts,” Margaret spat out. “Advanced flatware, my brother called it — with Marvin, he said, the apple didn’t fall far from the shop. My husband’s good with money, it’s the drop of Jew left in him. All the rest is mine.” She pulled herself erect and stared down at Bea. “He’s turned himself into what he thinks I am. That crest! All that research on the sacred family escutcheon! If Marvin could find a way to crawl inside my bloodstream, he’d do it.”
Bea said, “Why don’t you just take it for what it is? Flattery, or aspiration —”
“You’re trying to pacify me, I recognize the tone. The therapists here talk like that. Can’t you understand, my husband has no existence! He doesn’t exist. He has no self.”
Marvin the egotist: no self? Margaret, Bea saw, was intelligent. She had entered into a knowledge beyond the commonplace. She twisted up her face: the equidistant geometries crumpled.
“That green on the crest,” she said, “stands for water. The water James Watt took from the Clyde — that’s the boy who invented the steam engine just from watching a kettle boil, it’s in all the school-books. Breckinridges are descendants of Watt on the maternal side, did you know that?”
“No,” Bea said.
“Well, my husband knows it! And he expects his children to live up to it, it’s their
heritage,
noblesse oblige, they have to be worthy, they have to distinguish themselves. And he sees it in Iris — the chance of it. She’s got the brain for it, he says, if she sticks to it. My poor daughter, he has her living in that lab night and day. But Julian . . . it’s not only those nightmares, Marvin calls it an attraction to atrocity, he thinks Julian’s in love with anything that’s contaminated, can you believe such terrible words? Anything deformed, anything ruined, and he rushes to it — his own son!”
Then this was the moment — Margaret pacing to the make-believe fireplace and back, shoulders shrunken, clutching herself: the moment for telling. Bea stood up and took Margaret’s hand — a hint of tremor in the fingers.
“He’s afraid, Marvin’s afraid, that’s why! That thing Julian sent us, from some magazine they put out over there — about filthy birds in the streets. Ghetto stuff, Marvin said. He worries that Julian’s some sort of throwback —”
“Margaret,” Bea said. “I’ve seen him. In Paris.”
“Julian? When, how?” Margaret’s hand leaped free, as from an electric charge. “What’s my son doing over there? Why doesn’t he come home?”
“He didn’t confide in me, you know. It was all so brief — he seems well enough, even a bit on the plump side. I had the impression that he’s gotten fluent in French. Some people would call that polish.”
Polish! Was it justifiable to lie to an invalid? The ruthlessness of honesty: it was impossible to be truthful to Margaret. Her neck was hunched; she had crossed her arms and thrust her fists into her armpits. She was attempting to curl herself into a ball; it was not passivity. She was a bullet, a cannon, a salvo. Little by little the shots erupted. “Marvin had this idea,” she said, “a way to get him back. A capitulation, Marvin gave in, he actually gave in! Julian won’t do science, he
can’t
do science, he’s not made for it, so all right, something else, as long as it gets him to come home . . .”
Margaret’s eyes, the color of water, swam toward Bea like a pair of sharks. “He looked him up — that fellow.
That
fellow,” she said.
“Who?”
“The one you used to be married to.”
“Leo?” Bea cried. “What’s Marvin got to do with Leo?”
“My husband knows everyone in L.A., don’t ask me how, he has all these contacts, he gets in touch with people who get in touch with other people . . . he found out where that fellow lives, not far from
us,
in fact, Bel Air Circle, so he went to see him, it’s only around the corner —”
“He saw Leo? Why? Why would he do that, what possible business could Marvin have with Leo?”
“It’s the way Julian
is,
how he thinks — it’s all unreal, Marvin says, it’s dreaming —”
“What’s that got to do with Leo Coopersmith, for God’s sake!”
The invalid was in command. Bea had come to condole, to sympathize; or to test her daring, her restraint — was that why she had come? It was certain she had come in kindness. But the visit had turned topsy-turvy; Margaret’s volleys were flying fast. Bea no longer felt kind.
“The movies. Hollywood. Marvin thought he could get Julian
some sort of job he’d fit into, something he’d really like, to lure him —”
“And did he mention me? Is that what you’re saying? Was I his . . . his
reference?
”
“You were married to the fellow.”
“And then I wasn’t. Marvin went to Leo for
help,
is that it? He went begging to the oboe?”
“Oboe, what’s that? He’s in the movies, he’s a famous movie composer, isn’t he? And my husband doesn’t beg. He never begs.”
Bea said grimly, “Margaret, listen. Julian isn’t about to come back, there’s no sign of it. He’s got himself married. To a displaced person — you know what that means, a displaced person? And your daughter isn’t living in her lab, she’s with your son and his wife. In Paris. Right now. I left them yesterday.”
The water trembled; the sharks vanished. The tiny whitish eyelashes blinked.
“I don’t believe you,” Margaret said. “Marvin never told me anything like that.”
“He doesn’t know any of it. I’m the spy who was sent behind enemy lines to bring back the news. Fresh intelligence, Margaret.”
“I don’t believe you. Iris is in school. Julian’s too young to be married. You should go away now.”
“Yes,” Bea said.
They walked, side by side, from cell to cell — the sun had moved lower, the windows were dull now — until they came to where the easel stood. Here the bad smell worsened.
“You should see my work,” Margaret said. “My therapy.”
She swiveled the easel to show Bea. Dark sky, dark hills, dark barren ground. A central smudge that appeared to approximate the figure of a woman, or was it a man? All of it dark and lavishly laid on.
Marvin’s wife had mastered the art of human excrement.
F
OR HIS TWENTY-THIRD
birthday Julian received a check from his father, accompanied by a businesslike note explaining how to circumvent the bank’s discount on foreign money, so as to change dollars into francs without a loss of value. His father was good at such shortcuts, but Julian was indifferent: he had no intention of beginning what was certain to become a quarrel with some factotum in a bank, and anyhow Marvin’s instructions, thickened by numbers and percentages, were over his head. It was enough that the figure on the blue paper rectangle promised another installment on Mme. Duval’s rent, and a whole week free of waiting on tables. Not that Julian despised shortcuts in general — it was Alfred who’d introduced him to a certain François who got him jobs under the table, or however they said this in French, and it was through Alfred that his little thing on the Marais had reached the Princess, and from the Princess had ascended to print. Print! It had happened twice, but now Alfred was dead, and he was on his own, without an intermediary, though he still kept a covetous eye on the
Paris Review.
Without Alfred, who was fearless and knew everyone, he had no chance there, he wasn’t good enough, he wasn’t diligent enough, or confident enough. He was what they called him at home, a
luftmentsh,
or at least his father called him that, his mother wouldn’t have known such a word, it meant an inconsequential person, an impracticality made of air, she would have defended him . . .
He had read about those legendary writers who sat in a favorite
café every morning, driving their pens, oblivious to everything around them, the clatter and chatter, the passersby, the street noises, the car horns. He had never witnessed anything like that, which didn’t imply that it couldn’t be done, and as a matter of fact he was doing it right now, not in the morning (he didn’t get up early if he didn’t have to) but at two o’clock in the afternoon, at Le Tisserand, where he had never worked and wasn’t known and wouldn’t be laughed at. About the check he was both happy and resentful — happy because he could loiter here, with a bottle of beer and his smooth new notebook with its margins marked in red, and resentful because he understood that the money was both a bribe and a threat.
One more month,
his father had written below the numbers and the percentages,
and then home.
Those six monosyllables pounded like gongs. A brief chirp from his mother:
Are you all right, Julian? We miss you.
Nothing from his sister — she had other means: she hid his letters, and answered them secretly.
He had already filled four pages: his idea was to invent a series of clever little fables, in style something between Aesop and La Rochefoucauld (Alfred had put him on to La Rochefoucauld), with morals at the end, only the morals wouldn’t be morals — he’d call them
immorals,
and they’d be the opposite of what his deceptively straight-faced tales appeared to prescribe or warn against. And the language would be simple and “transparent,” a term he had learned from Alfred; but Alfred was unhelpfully dead, and the
Paris Review
had already sent back half a dozen of his fables. He thought he should find another name for them.
It had begun to rain, at first lightly, and a deadening of the air, and the smell of wet pavement drifting in from the outdoors, excited him a little: it was the smell of anticipation. Then it darkened, and a dimness settled over where he sat against a rear wall, with his feet on a chair belonging to a nearby table, and the rain hurtled down with a tropical force in dense gray curtains that flew in from the street. A rowdy party of three or four young girls dashed in, instantly soaked through, laughing and tugging at their backpacks: there was a lycée
in the neighborhood. He liked looking at them — the rounded calves above their low socks, the rise of the small hillocks just under their collarbones, dripping hair falling to the middle of their backs. They were twelve or thirteen or even fourteen; and right behind them, a middle-aged woman. He presumed the woman was a teacher (she was carrying a briefcase), or else the mother of one of the girls, but she quickly separated herself from the group and left them standing in the doorway, giggling and squeezing the water from one another’s hair and braiding it into pigtails. The woman spotted a vacant table and opened her briefcase: rain trickled from its sides. But Julian kept his eye on the girls — only one of them was really pretty. He wished she were older, eighteen, say; if she were eighteen, or twenty, he would get up and sidle close and tease her in his improving French. Or if she were one of those American girls (but no, she wasn’t, the whole noisy bunch of them had erupted out of that lycée down the street), those American girls who were everywhere nowadays, in every corner of the city, he could start out as he always did with American girls: “So which one are you, Gertrude or Alice?” — which was of course a sort of test, to earn him either an ignorant retort or an invitation to say his name and where he was from and what he was doing in Paris, and after that who could tell what might follow? Especially if it turned out she was one of those French majors from Vassar or Smith or Bryn Mawr, who always knew who Gertrude and Alice were. And that was the joke of it: he’d learned from the photographs that Gertrude and Alice were ugly and old, in fact they looked like ugly old men, squat and (he guessed) pigeon-toed. The woman who had hurried in along with that gaggle of wild girls — the pretty one couldn’t have been more than thirteen — wasn’t exactly ugly, and not as old as he had at first imagined, but he’d had only a flash of her, she was no one he would ordinarily notice. He was noticing her now only because she was a distraction, more from the girls than from his pathetic cat fable, which was faltering anyhow: she was pulling a sheet of paper and a mechanical pencil (the kind his father kept in his breast pocket) out of that briefcase, cheap cardboard flaking
off at the seams — it wasn’t made to be rained on. She had arranged her things — a long-sleeved sweater and a bag with the oval end of a bread sticking out — two chairs away from where he sat (the one in between had his feet on it), and he could almost see what she was writing. It had the commonplace shape of a letter, and at once he lost interest: she wasn’t a fellow inventor of fables, she wasn’t pretty, she wasn’t young, she wasn’t a sort he would ever approach to ask about Gertrude or Alice. She was only a woman who had come in out of the wet.